Atomic Show #334 – Jonathan Nistor, COO Blue Wave AI Labs

About this episode

Jonathan Nistor discusses the role of AI in improving the efficiency of nuclear power plant operations.

Blue Wave AI Labs has been creating and supplying artificial intelligence tools – mainly in the form of machine learning – to operating nuclear power plants since 2016. Their initial set of tools focused on improving boiling water reactor core reload designs. The company was formed to address the chosen problem because it was a time consuming – aka expensive – data-driven task with a large number of variables, each with a significant amount of uncertainty that was mitigated by inserting large margins. Though operating with those large margins provided safety and operational reliability, the extra margins led to increased costs/reduced revenues in the form of higher than necessary enrichments, shorter refueling cycles and/or operating at a lower than rated power. Jonathan Nistor is Blue Wave AI’s chief operating officer and one of its early employees. During his visit to the Atomic Show he provided a lot of deep technical details about addressing the challenges of designing BWR core reloads and also provided some insights into new directions that AI (artificial intelligence, not to be confused with Atomic Insights) can take to improve the operating efficiency of nuclear…

People in this episode

Host: Rod Adams

Guest: Jonathan Nistor

Topics covered

• artificial intelligence
• nuclear power
• machine learning
• boiling water reactor
• core reload designs
• operational efficiency

Keywords

• AI tools
• machine learning
• nuclear power
• BWR core reloads
• operational reliability
• data-driven tasks

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Blue Wave AI Labs, Atomic Insights, Blue Wave AI, nuclear power plants

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